Right product, right place, right time, right price – that’s the new customer expectation. Issues must be resolved without delay on the channel of the customer’s choosing. The problem facing businesses is that every customer has different preferences.
As a result, greater emphasis is being placed on making every customer interaction seamless. Employees need as much information as possible about each customer so they can better understand what they need and why. This data must be current, complete, accurate and easily accessible. It must provide actionable insights that allow organizations to further optimize the customer experience, build loyalty and identify opportunities to increase revenue.
As organizations look to enhance customer interactions and make all related business processes as efficient as possible, interest in artificial intelligence (AI) has grown. With AI tools becoming more widely available, adoption of AI in contact centers is expected to increase. When paired with contact center analytics, AI can improve workflows and decision-making and help organizations identify future trends. Some analysts believe AI is also one of the top trends in unified communications (UC).
AI is the ability of technology to simulate human intelligence by using data to learn, reason, predict and adapt. In a business environment, organizations are using AI to recognize patterns in large volumes of data with greater speed, efficiency and accuracy than humans ever could.
For example, AI can use computer data to generate text that sounds like natural language. Speech recognition technology uses AI to transform human speech into a format that can be recognized and used by applications. Chatbots can be used to provide customer service and support. They can answer simple questions with automated responses via live chat or instant messaging and resolve customer issues without human intervention.
In addition to helping organizations operate more efficiently and leverage their data, AI can enhance the customer experience. Gartner predicts a shift to self-service customer support in which the customer will manage 85 percent of their relationships with an organization without human intervention. In this scenario, organizations really have no choice but to deploy intelligent technology that meets this demand.
In the contact center, AI can help organizations identify a customer’s preferred communications channel and automatically route the call to the agent who is best-suited to help that customer resolve a specific issue. Personalized messages can be sent to the customer automatically using their preferred channel. With AI, an agent often knows why a customer is calling before the interaction begins. For example, if a customer calls a bank on a regular basis, an text containing the customer’s account balance could be automatically sent based on prior behavior.
AI can also be a valuable collaboration tool in that it can automate tasks and streamline workflows. For example, if a group of people has regular meetings that require certain information and documents, AI can recognize this and automatically pull everything together in advance. If two people have been collaborating on the same project, AI can automatically bring all pertinent information into view when they interact.
The use of AI in a business environment is still relatively new, but there’s no denying the potential it has to improve the customer experience, particularly in the contact center, and enhance UC and collaboration. At this stage of the game, organizations should be monitoring UC vendors’ AI capabilities, identifying potential use cases, and staying up to speed on new AI solutions and functionality.
